Worn Out

Cock Rock and Fashion

The next Hattie's Highway to Rock 'n' Roll Trivia happens on Tuesday, November 27, at Hattie's Hat in Ballard, and it's bound to be fun as shit. Hosts Megan Cookies and Tracey Shug have so much knowledge, it's surreal. They ask questions like "Which LA band headlined Heavy Metal Day at the legendary US Festival in 1983?" (Answer: Van Halen, dummy.) Sometimes there are fill-in-the-lyrics tests, or audio rounds with live guitar players, or visual rounds with album-cover identifications. And throughout, loads of hair metal facts tribute the old scene, back when rock stars were all transvestited-up and hooker-y and sinuous and prancing and disoriented. It was the best men have ever been.

"All these guys were dating strippers, so they wore their lingerie and their makeup," Tracey says as we flip through photos of bands like Nitro and Hanoi Rocks, with their strings of pearls, their bouquets of crispy hair, their expressions of mock surprise, their lip gloss aglisten in the smoky lights. Ritzy codpieces also captured attention, or guys wore jeans so tight they fit like panties. "They wanna show the package, and show it tough," says Megan.

"Mötley Crüe was the quintessential LA glam band," Megan says, Tracey agrees, and the biography The Dirt details some fashion happenings. Nikki Sixx: "I was wearing leather pants, high heels, a torn T-shirt, and makeup. I was sweaty and still completely high." Vince Neil: "I was really into white. I'd wear white satin pants with white leg warmers, Capezio shoes, chains around my waist, and a white T-shirt that I had ripped up the sides and sewn together with lace. I dyed my hair as white as I could get it, and fluffed it until it added half a foot to my height."

Continuing on, we get to a picture of David Lee Roth. "All towels and legwarmers," says Megan. In the next, he's topless, his mouth hangs sensuously open, his long, textured hair resembles a slab of pale-brown cotton candy. In Crazy from the Heat, he describes another look: "I had a pair of black leather pants with drawstrings in the front and the back made super low-cut. You could never sit down in them; you'd pop right out. They were unlined, just raw leather. Those damn pants stained my legs every time I'd go to sing, 'cause I'd sweat in them," and so everything was purple-black "except where my little underwear was," and once the pants came off, "all you'd see is my [junk] glowing in the dark because of the contrast."